Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (11 page)

Even so, she wouldn’t go In Town for him.

It’s come to this: my dog is on Prozac. Yes, you read that right. Ruby, my Pembroke Welsh corgi, is on Prozac. Laugh away. Tell me I must be crazy to put a dog on meds. My only defense is that talk therapy didn’t work.

Let me explain.

You may remember that I have four dogs: three golden retrievers and Ruby The Corgi. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of dogs would know that between three goldens and a corgi, it would be the corgi who would end up on a controlled substance.

My pets are like that
Sesame Street
song, “One of These Things Is Not Like The Others.” Here is what the goldens are like: fun, easy, friendly, happy, and loving, on a continuous loop. You could have three goldens in the room and not know it. They love to sleep. They love everything. Honestly, I kept adding goldens because I forgot they were there. You could be sitting in a roomful of goldens and think to yourself, You know, we need a dog.

The corgi is Not Like The Others. Here is what the corgi is like: sensitive, alert, watchful, picky, and feisty. If she’s in the room, you know it. In fact, you’re probably obeying her. Corgis are low to the ground, dwarf dogs bred to herd cattle, and
Ruby has been known to herd the goldens, me, my daughter, and also, on occasion, the UPS guy. How Ruby knows what she was bred to do, way back in Wales three thousand years ago, is beyond me. I got her at Christmas, after daughter Francesca had gone off to college. Ruby was intended to replace Francesca, which is not working out exactly as planned. How many parents can say that their dog is on drugs, but their kid isn’t?

To get back to the story, Ruby used to be a wonderful and funny dog, but she recently morphed into The Terrifying Biting Attacking Dwarf. In the summer of the movie
Transformers,
Ruby got transformed. She’s like
Saw
, with paws. For some reason, she began to start fights with the oldest golden, Lucy, whenever that sweet old dog ambled into the kitchen, took a nap, or committed an otherwise unpardonable offense.

I admit to you, I didn’t handle this well. I’m the mother of only one child, so I have no idea what to do when my kids fight. I don’t know how people with more than one child handle this problem. I thought back to what my mother used to say, when she had to break up a fight between brother Frank and me, so I tried screaming, “Separate, you two!” But it didn’t work.

Also, “Stop or I’ll turn this car around.” But it didn’t apply.

Then I remembered that when we were really bad, my mother would take off her shoe and throw it at us. But I’m beyond that. Also, I missed.

So Francesca and I took Ruby to the vet, who suggested that maybe the fighting was happening because Ruby realizes that Lucy is getting older and therefore losing her position as leader of the pack. Evidently, Ruby wants to be the new boss, and will bite and chew her way to the top. She’s Donald Trump on four legs.

The sad part is that good old Lucy doesn’t care who’s leader of the pack. No golden does, at least none of mine. They say: You wanna lead the pack? Knock yourself out. I’m going back to sleep. You won’t even know I’m here.

So we tried to manage the problem, with lots of no’s, daily walks, and some calm assertiveness learned from TV’s Cesar Milan, The Dog Whisperer. I used to watch his show for fun; now I watch it like homework. I read his book. I bought the special Illusion collar, which I can’t figure out how to put on.

But in the end, I turned to drugs. Ruby is now on ten milligrams of Prozac, twice day.

Soon, she’ll be in Ruhab.

I’m a big fan of nature. I enjoy walking through the grass with my dogs, or riding little Buddy through the woods. Also I like to look through the window at a cloudless blue sky, pretty as a Microsoft screensaver. In other words, I like nature just fine, as long as it stays outside.

But lately at my house, nature has been overstepping her bounds.

It began at the first dip in the temperature, and to me, it’s no coincidence that it happened at football season. For some reason, around this time of year, every time I open my front door, spiders try to run inside my house. I’m not kidding. It’s as if the spiders have been huddling out front, and the sound of the doorknob is their hut-hut-hut signal. I open the door and, instantly, spiders charge over the threshold at me, in a flying spider wedge formation. I’m not talking only one or two spiders; I’m talking about six or seven spiders, and they’re huge, like spider linebackers in a Super Bowl team of arachnids.

I have no defense.

I can’t bring myself to kill them, because I couldn’t take the guilt. I learned somewhere along the line that spiders are good for us and blah blah blah. Even if I were less of a goody-goody, it would be impossible to kill them all. It would be like playing
whack-a-mole, and four or five of them would run through my legs, which they consider mere goal posts to scoring a spider touchdown. Sometimes they have to settle for a spider field goal, which is when they reach the floor vents and disappear inside. By October, my heating ducts will be full of webs, the perfect decoration for their big Halloween party.

Back in the summer, or preseason, when only one or two spiders played for the team, I was able to defend my end of the field by turning a glass tumbler over them, then slipping a magazine underneath the tumbler and taking them back outside, where they belong. Another defense that worked was cursing and stamping my feet, because they seemed to react to hysteria and/or profanity. They would simply turn around, run outside, and regroup for the next play. But my tumbler defense won’t work anymore; I don’t have the coordination, or the glassware.

The current score is Spiders 52, Scottoline 0. They even improved their record from last season and while they claim they made some excellent trades, I smell steroids.

Either way, I know when I’m licked, and my only solution was to stop using my front door. Now I go out the back door all the time, which is completely inconvenient, not to mention embarrassing. I save face only by telling myself that I have outsmarted the spiders, at least until they resort to battering rams of praying mantises.

But it gets worse.

The other day, I came home and in the kitchen was my adorable gray-and-white kitten, Vivi, resting like a baby Sphinx—in front of a long green snake, which lay motionless on the floor. I went into my hysteria-and-profanity routine, but, to my horror, it awakened both kitten and snake. The snake slithered at warp speed over the Karastan and through the kitchen chairs. Vivi took off after the snake, and I took off after Vivi.

There ensued chasing (Vivi) and wriggling (snake) and screaming (me). Somehow I scooped Vivi up and threw her into the bathroom, then I screamed some more while the snake undulated around the kitchen, its green head raised like a suburban cobra.

By the way, no other pets came to my aid. The other kitten scooted off, her black tail a question mark, and my three golden retrievers lolled sleepily on the kitchen floor, though I could tell they were rooting for me, inside. Ruby The Corgi pointed and laughed, which means that I’m cutting her Prozac.

I didn’t know what to do. If I couldn’t bring myself to kill a spider, there was no way I could bring myself to kill a snake. I wouldn’t know how, anyway. Step on it? You can only ask so much of a clog.

I ran to the closet, grabbed a broom, and, screaming the entire time, swept the snake out of the house, through the front door.

The snake was only too glad to slither outside.

The spiders were only too glad to run inside.

Touchdown!